The Heart Skills: Peacemakers Are Made, Not Born
A hundred highly trained peacemakers descended into ad hominem attacks during a real crisis — and that's when Dr. Patrick Mason realized peacemaking isn't about skills, it's about character.
Dr. Patrick Mason and Nell Rose Hill
6/25/20267 min read
What if the real conflict isn't between you and another person but between the stories you're telling about them?
That's the quiet insight at the heart of a recent conversation on the All Peacemakers Needed video series. Host Nell Rose Hill sat down with Dr. Patrick Mason, a professor of religious studies and history at Utah State University and co-author of Proclaim Peace. Patrick's background is in peace studies from the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame, and his work explores the architecture of conflict transformation.
This is not a conversation about geopolitics or policy. It's about your marriage. Your relationship with your kids. The stories you narrate in your own head about why people do what they do. It's about what happens when you stop reducing people to their positions and start seeing them as three-dimensional human beings. And it's about a radical idea: that peacemakers aren't born — they're made, through the hard work of building character.
Watch the full video interview below, then read on for the highlights.
Peacemaking Is About Relationships
When Patrick was asked what peacemaking means to him, he didn't hesitate.
"To me, peacemaking is really at its heart the effort to build and maintain full relationships with people. Relationships that are resilient and that are built to offer the opportunity for everyone to flourish."
It sounds simple. But notice what he left out: he didn't mention winning. He didn't mention solving. He said relationships. Full, resilient, flourishing relationships.
Most of us are conflict avoiders. That's the number one conflict style — and it's certainly Patrick's. "I'd much rather hide under a rock and hope the storm blows over," he said with a wry smile. But peacemaking, he explains, isn't afraid of conflict. In fact, peacemaking requires engaging with conflict, not running from it.
And it happens at every level. There's the work of building peace in your own heart. Peace with God. And then, most importantly for most of us, interpersonal peace — in marriages, with family, with friends. But underneath it all, peacemaking is rooted in the concept of shalom from the Old Testament: wholeness. Everyone getting what they need to flourish.
The Heart Skills: Peacemakers Are Made, Not Born
Patrick shared a story that stayed with him — and that changed how he understands peacemaking.
During his graduate studies at the Kroc Institute, he was part of an extraordinary cohort: 24 or 25 students from 20 or 21 countries. Highly skilled, highly trained people who had already been doing peacemaking work in their home countries. They came together, earned their degrees, and stayed connected through an alumni listserv — hundreds of peacemakers, all equipped with A+ training in the theories and skills of peace building.
Then the Hamas attack on Israel happened.
"The listserv immediately just blew up," Patrick said. Many people on the list were Palestinian or Israeli or had deep ties to the region. They were friends. They were affected. And what happened next shook him.
This listserv of hundreds of highly skilled peacemakers devolved into something you could have found in any corner of the internet. Ad hominem attacks. Enmity. People attacking each other, not engaging with each other's ideas.
"It made me realize how hard this work is," he said quietly. "If even people who are highly skilled and highly trained can get caught up in the same conflict patterns as anybody else... maybe we had learned a lot of skills and concepts and theories, but what we weren't displaying was that kind of heart of peace."
That's when Patrick had a realization: peacemaking requires something deeper than technique. It requires character.
"Peacebuilders are made, not born," he said. "These are things you have to learn and develop. But I think the primary thing you have to learn and develop are the set of personal characteristics and virtues — the heart skills — without which your peacemaking is going to ring shallow and probably come up short, especially in crisis moments."
You can have all the training in the world. But if you don't have the character — the humility, the patience, the willingness to see people as people — your peacemaking will fail when it matters most.
See People as People, Not Positions
In his peacemaking classes, Patrick teaches students one skill first. It's foundational. Everything else depends on it.
"See people as people. Or put another way: don't reduce people to positions."
We do this instinctively. In conflict, the first thing we do is dehumanize. Sometimes not in horrific ways that lead to violence, but in the everyday sense: we stop seeing someone in their full humanity. We see them as a position instead — a political stance, a parenting philosophy, a religious belief. We're in conflict with the position. We forget that it's a person on the other side of it.
"There's reasons for that," Patrick said. "There's background, there's experience, there's emotions. There's all the kinds of things that make us us. And just like I would never want to be reduced to a two-dimensional version of myself, one of the first things I need to avoid in peacemaking is doing that to somebody else."
He uses his own marriage as an example. He and his wife have been married more than 20 years. They have complementary personalities, different worldviews, different approaches. There were probably times early on when they buried disagreements just to get through the day.
"Eventually those things kind of build up," he said. And so he's been learning — still learning — to do conflict differently with the person he loves most. Not by asking her to change, but by asking himself: "What if I changed A or B or C? What if I identified one thing I could work on?"
Because here's the thing: if you're waiting for the other person to change, you're powerless. If you're working on yourself, you have agency.
Curious, Not Judgmental
Patrick loves the Ted Lasso principle: "Be curious, not judgmental."
And here's why it matters: judgment is what makes us reduce people to positions in the first place.
"It's judgment that makes us reduce people," Patrick explained. "Or once we've done that, then we judge them for who they are, what they've done, or the story that we tell about them."
Conflict, at its heart, is about stories. It's about the stories we tell ourselves and about other people and about our relationships with each other. When you approach someone with judgment, you write a flat, two-dimensional story about them. But when you approach with curiosity — Tell me more. Help me understand. Why do you see it that way? — you start filling in the blanks. You give them a backstory. You let them be complex.
"None of us like reading a novel where all the characters are just flat and two-dimensional," Patrick said. "Why would we do that in our real lives?"
One example: his uncle, his father's brother who passed away. This man was curious about everybody. He'd ask people to tell him about themselves. He genuinely wanted to know their stories. And the first thing Patrick thought of when his uncle died was this: He made me feel like I was of great worth.
That's what curiosity does. It tells people: you matter. Your story matters. Your experience matters. There's something about being genuinely curious about another person that makes them feel seen.
But Patrick was clear: this isn't naive. Being curious doesn't excuse harm or enable abuse. It doesn't make the conflict disappear. What it does is open a door. It creates space for something other than enmity.
"If we approach a relationship with judgment and reducing the other person, I can tell you what your odds are of having a positive relationship," he said. "They're pretty much zero. But if we come to a relationship with openness, with curiosity, with forgiveness — with the character and skills of a peacemaker — there's a nonzero chance. I can't guarantee it's 100%, but it's somewhere between zero and 100. And that makes all the difference."
Conflict Transformation, Not Just Conflict Resolution
There's a paradigm that shifted Patrick's thinking entirely: the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation.
In legal and business settings, conflict resolution makes sense. You have a problem, you solve it, you move on. It's transactional. You're looking for a win-win where both parties walk away satisfied.
But in the relationships that matter most — marriages, friendships, family, community — that framework breaks down.
"I'm not here to solve my wife," Patrick said. "I'm not here to solve my kids or my friends. Those relationships are ongoing. They're dynamic. They're organic. And I don't want to be solved by somebody else. I don't want to see myself as a problem in need of solutions. So why should I see other people that way?"
Conflict transformation is different. It's more alive. You're not trying to eliminate the conflict and move on. You're transforming the relationship itself — taking the more negative, destructive aspects and moving them toward something more positive, healthy, vibrant.
It's organic. It's relational. It honors the ongoing nature of real connection.
Start Close
As the conversation wrapped up, Patrick offered one final piece of advice — and it's maybe the most important.
"There's a temptation sometimes to say, 'The world is full of so many problems. I don't know what to do.' But we start close in. We start with the things closest to us. We start with our own heart. We start with the people right around us."
That's where peacemaking begins. Not with grand gestures or big platforms. With the person next to you. With your own story about yourself and others. With the willingness to be curious instead of certain.
"And for me, I think that's what Jesus calls us to do," Patrick said. "And where I think we can have the greatest effect."
Tips for Becoming a Better Peacemaker
See people as people. Not positions. Not arguments. Not the one thing they said twenty years ago that you've frozen them in. When you feel conflict escalating, ask yourself: Have I reduced this person to a position? How can I remember their full humanity?
Be curious, not judgmental. When you feel judgment rising, pause. Ask a question instead. "Tell me more. Help me understand. Why do you see it that way?" Curiosity opens doors that judgment slams shut.
Work on yourself first. Stop waiting for the other person to change. Ask instead: What's one thing I could work on? What responsibility do I have here? Paradoxically, working on yourself transforms relationships far more than waiting for others to transform.
Tell better stories. The stories you tell about people and situations shape everything. When you approach someone with curiosity, you write a richer, more complex story about them. That matters.
Build character, not just skills. Learn the techniques of peacemaking, yes. But the real work is building the character — the humility, patience, vulnerability, and wisdom — that makes those techniques land. Without character, peacemaking rings hollow.
Practice in the close relationships. Your marriage. Your kids. Your aging parent. Your friends. These are your training ground. This is where you develop the heart skills that matter most.
Let go of outcomes. You can't force people to respond the way you want. But you can show up with openness, curiosity, and the character of a peacemaker. And that nonzero chance? That's where transformation lives.
Want to go deeper? Check out Dr. Patrick Mason's book Proclaim Peace and his podcast of the same name. Both explore the theology and practice of peacemaking in depth. And consider his invitation: start close. Start with your own heart. Start with the people right around you.
Because All PEACEMAKERS ARE NEEDED.
The All Peacemakers Needed video series features conversations between everyday people exploring the practice of peacemaking. New episodes are released regularly.
